Bill Budge will be making an appearance at GDC 2013 to give a “Classic Postmortem” on his hit software title Pinball Construction Set. Â From the GDC 2013Â news item:
… Bill Budge, father of the seminal Pinball Construction Set will lay out one of the earliest examples of an in-game editor – a title that game developer legend Will Wright has credited as a key influence on the simulation games that launched him to stardom
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Published in 1983 by Electronic Arts, Pinball Construction Set created a new genre in video games that encouraged user generated content where players could trade personalized content via floppy disk. The game’s editor allowed players to construct their own virtual pinball tables, and players could save these tables to disk and trade them with friends.
The editor’s clean and simple interface even served as inspiration to designs behind SimCity six years later – The Sims creator Will Wright cited Pinball Construction Set as his key inspiration while speaking on the GDC 2012 panel “Forgotten Tales Remembered.” Bill Budge, the father of the seminal Construction Set entry, will lay out the blueprints for how he created his own game and one of the earliest examples of an in-game editor.
This should go nicely with Budge’s release of the PBC source code earlier this week.
GDC 2013 is scheduled to take place March 25 – 29, 2013 in San Francisco.  Registration and travel information can be found here.